PropertyMaps Corporate Blog

We’ve integrated over 2,300,000 businesses into the Location Information pages. These neighborhood pages already provide information on population demographics, recent home sales, climate and weather, employment and finance, crime statistics, community overview, cost of living information, school information, sex offender listings, and now Business Information (and no, I’m not just keyword stuffing here). Check out my home town, Del Mar, for an example.

Check out more information in our Business Information press release.

PropertyMaps.com Links Neighborhood Business
Information to Home Listings Data

In a previous post, I mentioned we hired a few key people but intentionally left it vague. Today, I’m proud to announce one of those key members is Glenn Selig, an award-winning reporter and investigative journalist who enjoyed a successful 20-year career in TV news. Glenn will be joining us as Executive Vice President and Director of Marketing. Check out the press release on Glenn Selig.

Update: Check out the North Texas press release.

We’re ploughing through our data queue and have added another 40,000 properties to the Dallas Area / North Texas. This feed is fresh out of the oven so we’re still pulling the hundreds of thousands of images required for these properties. We’ve also been fine tuning our data pulling algorithms to keep the content as up to date as possible. I’ll probably post an item about this when we release a planned time related feature in the near future.

PropertyMaps Adds Dallas / North Texas to Expanding Dataset

Update: The URL format for the geocoder has changed and has been corrected below.

We have a new geocoder function that we are testing out and want to get the general public in on it. The geocoder uses several backend engines, so the idea is: if the address is not found in our database, we look to our in-house engine. If it’s not found there, we look to another engine and cache that. If it’s still not found, we continue looking through engines until the address is found or a failure occurs. Typing in complete garbage is going to result in a failure of course.

The more people using this, the more robust it becomes, so we are releasing it to the general public. If you do not have an API key, there is a built-in four second delay for all lookups, this is to prevent abuse. If you want a free API key, please contact us about it and at least let us know what you plan on using it for.

With (or even without) an API key, you can access the geocoder directly rather than submitting the form each time. The GET string is of the form http://www.propertymaps.com/geocode.index?address=[STREET ADDRESS]&city=[CITY]&state=[2 LETTER STATE ABBREVIATION]&z=[ZIP]&api=[API Key]&type=[CSV|XML]

Here is an example: Click Here.

We’re now in North Carolina with the addition of about 12,000 properties in the Winston-Salem area. Check out our press release on Camel City. We have many more areas on the map that will be online shortly so check back regularly. Also, we have a whole slew of announcements to make next week we are really excited about so stay tuned…

Did I mention we’re hiring? If you’re interested in joining a great team of programmers at a rapidly expanding startup, please check out our careers page.

PropertyMaps Adds Winston-Salem, North Carolina Properties

Update: Check out the Austin press release.

We’ve added another 12,000 or so properties to Austin and surrounding areas. We have several more feeds lined up for Texas so you’ll soon see thousands of additional properties. You may have also noticed our new pushpins, they give you a much better idea of what they represent - a state capitol, a group of houses, a property, etc. You can also check out the other 32 new pushpins if you click the “Location Information” tab on any property details page.

PropertyMaps Enters Austin, Texas

I can’t remember who said it, but the quote goes something like this: “If you aren’t worried about scalability, you aren’t growing fast enough.” Well, we have built a solid foundation for the inevitable horizontal scaling of the site so we aren’t so worried. But we do have to spread the services a bit thinner and bring up yet more machines. During this upgrade, due to happen the morning of Aug. 22nd, there MAY be outages of the PropertyMaps website. We will do our best to minimize downtime, but we are human and things do happen. I won’t get into technical details, but this upgrade will also give us the ability to automate the process of bringing more machines online when needed, effectively eliminating any chances of human related downtime. We love our machines.

San Francisco properties have been added to the map. This brings another 2,000 or so properties to our collection. The newly added data covers the limited area of the San Francisco peninsula, thus the low property count. Territories east and south of the Bay Area will be online in the next couple of weeks.

PropertyMaps Adds San Francisco Properties

On each property details page, we have added 2.3 million businesses, allowing you to see the property in relation to 32 different categories of business. Not all of the information is business related, we have sex offenders, schools, police/fire departments, etc. as well. We are continuously looking for ways to provide information to our home searchers so they can make the best purchasing decision possible.

PropertyMaps Adds 2.3 Million Businesses

Original article: “A Remodel Opens Door For Yahoo” by Pete Barlas

Dear Mr. Barlas,

Your article mentions how PropertyMaps.com recently has added sex offender information to our map-based MLS real estate search. In the article, Phil Immel, a longtime broker for Prudential, states “It is available by public record, but do you really want to put it on a button to click on while you’re trying to sell someone a house?” This type of thinking is why lead-based paint was made a required disclosure by the Federal government in 1992. Why would someone not want to disclose sex offender information if it could easily be provided? Just to sell a house? PropertyMaps.com strongly disagrees with this attitude. Potentially life-changing information being relegated to a post-closing disclosure is too little, too late. We recognize that sex offender information is of no consequence to millions of home purchasers. But if you think that the buyer might care, then this is all the more reason why you should disclose it. We want to enable our users to make informed decisions by having as much relevant information as possible. If PropertyMaps.com helps just one child stay safe by making their parents aware of potential danger, then that is worth more than any amount of home sales to us.

Sincerely,

John M. Beck
President,
www.PropertyMaps.com